NASA about to perform the ultimate software upgrade . . . on Mars

This is part of a panorama of Mars' Gale Crater released Thursday by NASA. Harsh place for an OS upgrade. (NASA/AP)

If you’ve owned a computer for any length of time, you probably know the anxiety associated with upgrading the operating system. Stepping up to the latest version of Windows or OS X is never trivial, which is why you’re urged to back up your important documents, make sure your hardware is in good shape and your general life karma is in order before your proceed.

At least when you do it, the computer you’re upgrading is on your desk (or your lap) and you’re there to monitor developments. Be grateful you’re not NASA,and the hardware you’re trying to upgrade isn’t millions of miles away – on Mars.

Starting Saturday, the space geeks at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will begin the process of replacing the operating system on the Curiosity rover. Upgrading your PC or Mac may take a couple of hours at most – it’s going to take these guys four days, according to Space.com.

And as Mike Watson, Curiosity’s mission manager, told reporters in a briefing Thursday, that’s about all the rover will be doing for a while:

Curiosity will begin this software transition on Sol 5, which translates to Saturday (Aug. 11) on Earth. The software upgrade process is expected to last roughly four days, Watkins explained. During this time, all other activities, including science, will temporarily be put on hold.

“Those flight software transition days — [Sols] 5, 6, 7 and 8 — are pretty devoted just to that flight software activity, and not to science,” Watkins said. “So, we’re kind of standing down from science.”

The reason for this is to avoid any kind of interference, and to allow enough time for engineers to finish the transfer and verify that everything is functioning according to plan. Once that work is complete, engineers and scientists will continue checking Curiosity’s instruments and gathering early science observations.

The software is being replaced because the code currently in Curiosity’s system is focused on landing the rover on Mars. The update’s emphasis is on day-to-day science activities.

Clearly, the OS being upgraded wasn’t written by Apple or Microsoft (insert a predictable Blue Screen of Death joke here). Rather, it was created by a company now owned by Intel. Wind River first developed the VxWorks operating system 27 years ago, according to this story from ExtremeTech. It’s a favorite of scientists who dispatch unmanned probes into space, as well as the makers of, um, home Wi-Fi routers:

I said that VxWorks is 27 years old, but that’s a bit unfair: The initial release was in 1985 (around the same time as MS-DOS 3.0), but it has been in constant development since then, reaching v6.9 last year. Why does Curiosity use VxWorks? It’s reliable, has a mature development toolchain, and presumably its low-level scheduling and interrupt systems are ideal for handling real-time tasks like EDL (entry, descent, and landing; aka, seven minutes of terror).

So the obvious question is, what kind of hardware is NASA upgrading? This state-of-the-art interplanetary rover uses less-than-cutting-edge components. In fact, its main processor was first seen on computers you may have discarded at the start of the 21st century.

Again, from ExtremeTech:

. . . In this case the Mars rover is powered by a RAD750, a single-board computer (motherboard, RAM, ROM, and CPU) produced by BAE. The RAD750 has been on the market for more than 10 years, and it’s currently one of the most popular on-board computers for spacecraft. In Curiosity’s case, the CPU is a PowerPC 750 (PowerPC G3 in Mac nomenclature) clocked at around 200MHz — which might seem slow, but it’s still hundreds of times faster than, say, the Apollo Guidance Computer used in the first Moon landings. Also on the motherboard are 256MB of DRAM, and 2GB of flash storage — which will be used to store video and scientific data before transmission to Earth.

That’s right. The smartphone in your pocket has more muscle than the rover that’s about to explore a distant planet.